PDF Toolbox

One of the most intuitive and powerful PDF toolboxes you can find, and visually appealing, too.

There are a number of PDF tool boxes out there nowadays, and they all do similar things – encrypt, decrypt, split, merge, plus something else. Such functionalities were novel many years ago, but now Acrobat itself is ever bloating up, and the third-parties therefore instead provide more creative, convenient, and light-weighted utilities like you are seeing now.

Our philosophy is that usability is as important as usefulness. One thing you would notice is that how ugly or cumbersome most of other software are. The competition situation pushed the shareware price to the ground and as the result no resource can be spent on usability design. After all, most of them are personal efforts and very few programmers are skillful in graphics design. Luckily for you, we are the few who are good in both worlds. It should be evident from these screenshots of the toolbox gadgets.

What’s new?

With the latest update, we offered an addition of four new gadgets, on top of an already leading and innovative collection. With the new Rasterize tool, you can convert pages into single-bit dithered images while still keeping PDF format; with the Trim tool, you can selectively delete contents of certain types to help save printer ink; with the Divide tool, you can cut a single PDF into a set of pages, each containing piece; and with the N-up (Stitch) tool, you can layout multiple pages on one, with page orientation automatically adjusted.

Dividing and stitching

The PDF toolbox has a launching interface, from where you can access the various functions. Each function is hosted in a uniformly designed window, in consistent ways. All gadgets support drag and drop — just drop a PDF file into the window (some gadgets support multiple files).

The Divide tool can cut a large page into smaller pieces, each containing only a portion of the original page. You can set the page ordering and preview the division effect within the GUI.

The N-up (Stitch) tool does the opposite but with greater flexibility as the page sizes of the incoming PDF may not be most suitable or uniform. You have an option of rotating the pages within the cells, whereas the cell dimension could change easily depending on the gridding. If the majority of pages are forced to rotate, then the flow direction of the entire page is also automatically adjusted.

Locking and unlocking

The way of human-computer interaction takes inspiration from modern mobile UIs. For example, to encrypt (lock) PDF files, you add them to the list, change settings, and press the button to start processing. To remove a file from the list, you click on the little bar icon and delete them directly one by one.

To change settings, the program shows them available choices in an elegant and intuitive way. Removing encryption is done in a similar fashion, although there is no parameter required except for a document-open password, which is likely unnecessary in most of the cases.

Merging and splitting

Another typical pair of functions is to split a large PDF file into smaller ones, or to combine pages from different PDFs into a single file. Our enhancements to this common problem is, it shows the result visually and what you see is what you get. For splitting, you can chose to break the document by page count, bookmark level, page parity, or define your own ranges. For merging, just load all files and then drag and drop pages to the right hand side to select and arrange then visually.

Losing weight

This secret tool can help you make a PDF file smaller by various methods. It can remove unwanted or unused data; compress stream data; writes new xref stream; etc. In the future, it shall also re-code images to make them smaller, using techniques such as downsampling, color spacing change, compression quality change, etc.

In fact, the program draws the physical layout of objects for you to examine, and that alone would be of great value for some people!

Extracting stuff

You can get embedded images and fonts out of a PDF file. Load a file, and the program will list all images. Click to check, click again to uncheck. When you are done selecting, chose a file format and start exporting to a specified disk folder. For extracting fonts, the operation is similar though no thumbnails are necessary.

In addition, you can also extract attachments from a PDF, if there’s any. Well, you can make a PDF with attachment by yourself, too. Just load that PDF, and then add a file — any file — to create it. It is a very good way to dispatch arbitrary files that needs an informative or simply fancy envelope — in other words, the PDF page itself!

Creative modification

The Trim function selectively removes certain types of content from a given PDF. This could be used for removing large areas filled with color, exceptionally large text, all images etc. for multiple reasons. However please note that the remainder content in the converted PDF may not reproduce the same effect as the input.

The rasterization tool converts each page into a single image although still using the same PDF. It doesn’t convert it into images. You have a choice of using monocolor images or RGB images. With the former, you can chose from a set of four dithering options. By experience, the Stucki method has the best results for most applications. As to color image output, you can chose to use Jpeg compression with a moderate DPI and compression quality, so that each page would be only a few hundred kilobytes in size.